Trinity and Personhood
I have been teaching a graduate course on the Trinity this semester and it has impelled me to think anew about the Trinity and what the implications of the Trinity might mean for future planetary life. As I wrote in my last blog, I do not think that we have a functioning trinitarian theology. We have a monarchic theology—a one-stop God—and many people cannot seem to move beyond it. For some people, a ruling divine monarch provides a sense of safety and security. As one parish priest said in a homily after the outbreak of the Gaza war: God is in control.
Last evening, I attended a beautiful Passover celebration and had a lovely conversation with a Rabbi who said to me, in effect, God creates us uniquely and distinctly because without each one of us the world would be incomplete. Each person makes an eternal difference to God. This idea resonated with me because Teilhard de Chardin said that God and world are becoming something more together and, I would add, the synthesis of this complementary union lies within us. Carl Jung described this union as a process of individuation. As I enter the interior depths of my personhood through intensified consciousness, God rises up from the unconscious into the conscious reality of my life. In Jung’s view the two-nature doctrine of Chalcedon (divine and human) was not particular to Jesus Christ; rather, the two natures signify the two natures of consciousness and unconsciousness in every person. That is, the unification of these levels effects the divinization of every person. Without individuation, history goes awry. God needs humankind to become both whole and complete. It is precisely an expanded and higher consciousness which Jung believes God acquires through incarnation in humankind. The redemption of God is the redemption of history. Both Jung and Teilhard de Chardin said that God and world are to be united in human consciousness as the depth meaning of history, both personal and collective.
The unitive nature of God and world connotes deep relationality. Thomistic theology with its metaphysics of participation cannot embrace a real God-world relationship; indeed, for Thomas, the immanent or inner life of the Trinity is primary to the economic life of God in the world. God for the world is not necessarily God with the world. However, relationship requires a mutual being with the other. It is interesting that the use of the word “person” lies in the development of trinitarian theology. For the Cappadocian writers (Basil of Caeserea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa), the term “person” had relational significance. A “person” is an ecstatic center of relationship who stands under (subsists) or in relation to another. What I am is distinguished by what I am not. I am “this” and not “that,” yet, without “that” I cannot be “this.” I am unique and distinct but not isolated and separate. In this respect, a person is not adequately defined by the term “individual,” because a person is an open and ecstatic reality. To be a person is to be a center of transcendent activity open to wholeness and unity. Beatrice Bruteau wrote:
Our ‘I,’ our personhood, is not a product of God’s action, something left over after the action has ceased. Rather it is God’s action in the very actuality of acting. ‘We’ are not a thing but an activity. This is why God’s activity of ecstatically moving out to us is an act of coinciding with our activity, just as our union with God will be our ecstatically moving out to God as an act of coinciding with God’s activity. . . . This activity which we are and which God is, is the act of creative freedom, of initiative, of self-originated self-giving.
A trinitarian theology of personhood requires just that: persons in relationship. Personhood is key to human identity and to divine life; the distinction of person is precisely in relation to the whole. Thomas Merton said that God utters each of us like a partial thought of Godself. I would say that each of us is a unique thought of Godself, never to be uttered exactly the same way again for all eternity. In this respect, each of us contributes to God what God lacks in God’s own being, namely, the expression of divine love in this particular way, the way of my life. Each of us is like a fractal, a particular pattern of divine love, contributing to the unfolding of divine beauty through the complexifying particularities of our lives, in the same way that each of the persons of the Trinity contribute to the dynamic beauty of divine love.
The actualization of personhood takes place in self-transcendence, the movement of freedom toward communion with other persons. Personhood is an ongoing activity that is dynamic in nature. The twentieth-century theologian, Karl Rahner, said that the human person is a subject of infinite transcendence, grounded in self-presence, freedom and grace. His famous axiom stated that the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity. What God is in God’s own life, God shares with us. There are not two Gods: a God above and a God within. There is only one God, one movement in love, in which I am constantly born into new life. God who is within us constantly draws us beyond ourselves, toward something more. In her landmark book, God For Us, Catherine LaCugna said that talk of an immanent Trinity, that is, God’s “inner life” distinct from history, as if God is a monarch in control, runs the danger of promoting a political and social order which sanctions potentially oppressive hierarchies. A controlling God can lead to all kinds of dominating hierarchies, religious, moral, political and sexual. However, a deeply relational God leads to a new presence of God without a monarch, a democratization of divinity as shared power of persons in communion. The Trinity does not have a superiority complex, it does not need to be a superpower. On the contrary, only a triune God, a deeply personal and relational God of love can hide in the human heart and patiently endure suffering and rejection, without renouncing or revoking a commitment to unconditional love.
To name “God” as Trinity is to name the ecstatic and relational wholeness that is divine life. God’s wholeness lies in being personal and relational. Since God is personal and relational, God is Trinity by virtue of the loving relationships that exist within the eternal plenum of divine life. The deeply relational and personal triune God is the infinite transcendent ground out of which I am called to create myself. To create myself is not a statement of autonomy apart from God; it is precisely my relationship with God that calls me into freedom, to make choices that enhance my freedom and thus my capacity to love more widely. I create myself by reconciling my many competing and contradictory levels of self within, which is the process of individuation and spiritual discernment; it is the journey to wholeness. I can know God precisely from within because something within me draws me to stretch my mind and heart toward the infinite. God is not a superpower up above waiting for me to arrive; God is the infinite potential of love within waiting to be born, to be actualized, to be acted upon by me. This acting upon—this “yes” to God—is the beginning of God’s birth in me. As I am transformed, God is transformed. As I take up the life of God within me, God assumes my humanity. Hence, I can go beyond myself precisely because God is my truest self’s power of life, so that every act of self-creation becomes an act of transcendence. As I become new, God becomes new precisely in the union of my personhood. God is born into the world in a new way, the way of my life. Teilhard wrote: “All around us and within our own selves, God is in process of changing as a result of his magnetic power and our own thought.”
To be distinctly human is to imagine what does not exist and to bring into existence that which has never existed. In this way, the human person shapes the world by creating the self, and this self-world creation, kindled by trinitarian love, shapes a more wholesome future of interpersonal life. Hence, the Trinity is the infinite potential of divine life opened to actualization and energized by love toward the future. The more conscious I become of God’s interpersonal love within me, the more I live by the life of the whole.
The Trinity, therefore, is not an abstract symbol of an incongruous God but the dynamism of love complexifying the energetic strands of our lives into relationships of greater unity. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the Trinity as a process of “trinitization,” whereby divine life, human life and cosmic life complexify into ever-greater cosmic wholeness. God is the infinite potential of love and love is the unitive energy that holds all life together, even when things fall apart. The world will not be saved by money or political power; the world will be saved by love because God is love, and love is our deepest reality. Only those who know the heart know this mystery.
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I’m deeply relieved by Sr. Ilia’s confession of Christ and her teaching that we are the interrelatedness — the very same interrelatedness — portrayed in the Trinity. “Our ‘I,’” she writes, “our personhood, is not a product of God’s action, something left over after the action has ceased. Rather it is God’s action in the very actuality of acting. ‘We’ are not a thing but an activity.” This is a quantum leap — a significant paradigm shift — that has been discouraged by the institutionalized authorities of the Church for a very long time. Being relatedness, rather than being an object stretches, our imaginations somewhat. Zen Buddhist practices are founded on such notions.
I think of Meister Eckhart’s (1260 – 1328) extraordinary statements about the mutuality between God and Mankind: “Whatever is proper to the divine nature, all that is proper to the just and divine man. Because of that, this man performs whatever God performs, and he created heaven and earth together with God, and he is the begetter of the Eternal Word, and god would not know how to do anything without such a man.” It appears from that statement that Eckhart understood mutuality as the Cardinal Principle.
I guess I don’t really have questions about what to do next or why this understanding has been prohibited. I can say that this shift in Christian thinking is a long time coming. I’m sticking it out and trying to help.
New life is created through the union of “others.” The best way for me to understand the right relatedness of Trinity is through my own marriage, family life, and home. If marriage is at the heart of the mystical tradition then earthly marriage should mirror the Trinitarian relationship. A deficient understanding of Trinitarian relatedness dehumanizes God (removes God from human experience) and leaves out an important part of the human psyche that most people experience every day, our sexual selves and desire for intimate relationship. The kind of intimate passion and desire that created the world was not between Father and Son. There is no room in that relationship not only for the Feminine but more importantly for the ecstatic, erotic, passion, desire and attraction that constitute the “fire” or energy of Love and the creation of new life. Nor does it explain the attraction for another that is at the heart of our own desire for wholeness within ourselves. We will only understand God’s passion for humanity when we face our fear of the sexual. That is the role of the Feminine and probably what Mary Magdalene brought to the life of Jesus,….the deep desire for an “other.”
Poderei dar-lhe razão, se não hipervalorizar a família patriarcal. Há muitas famílias matriarcais. Até no meu País – Portugal, as há, sobretudo no Norte.
Adão e Eva foi um mito, há muito tempo esclarecido.
English translation:
“I might be right if I don’t overvalue the patriarchal family. There are many matriarchal families. Even in my country – Portugal, there are them, especially in the North.
Adam and Eve was a myth, long ago clarified.”
Thank you so much Ilia.
Thank you Ilia for this absolute and wonderful revelation about the Trinity, I feel we are in desperate need of a more serious incorporation of the Trinity within our Mass celebrations. I also feel we suffer from relational starvation, and therefore an evolution towards the mystery of the Trinity can open our world to the actualization of the kingdom of God within our mist.
Aurele
“I do not think that we have a functioning trinitarian theology.” I couldn’t agree more! We must go beyond the elementary, monarchic understanding of God. This will likely result in some serious growing pains and perhaps downright outrage on the part of many “traditional” Christians. I think the church has yet to fully realize the inherent, Christic nature of the cosmos and the real, loving presence of the Holy Spirit in the ever-unfolding manifestation of God as all that is.
There is no separation. Reality is one, non-dual whole. God is not out there somewhere. The one, Christic cosmos is the multitudinous manifestation of the transcendent Father by the divine energies of the Holy Spirit. We are the activities of God, and man plays a critical role in the trinitarian unfolding of divine life. God is personal to the extent that we become persons – conscious participants in the trinitarian life of love.
It’s slow going here on the human side of the relationship with the divine. But that’s OK I guess, if God is as Jim Finley describes – an infinitely deep abyss of eternal love that we will be, or perhaps already are falling into. I am intrigued by the idea that God’s consciousness is evolving in tandem with creation, that it is creation that generates consciousness and bestows it upon God. This is exactly the reverse of how we have been taught to see our reality.
Existe uma co-evolução entre a crença e nós próprios (mesmo a nível genómico).
English translation: “There is a co-evolution between belief and ourselves (even at the genomic level).”
Think of an organism: Some have eye and some don’t. Some have bones and some don’t. The ONLY rule for an organism is that it can NEVER be SEPARATED. Every part of an organism is unique, and yet absolutely inter-dependent. My own total organism (this “critter”) has a consciousness, but each and every part has its own awareness and knowledge.
Now, think of the cosmos as the ONE ORGANISM–the REAL PRESENCE of God. (Jesus was not just talking about the bread and the wine, when he said THIS IS MY BODY.)
Now, imagine that it is not enough for the God Head to share its wholeness with its parts. There MUST exist PERSONS. PERSONS are in no way parts of the ONE ORGANISM, yet they cannot exist without a LIFE. Likewise, LIFE cannot joyfully exist without giving itself to PERSONS.
Thus, we have TRINITY. The ONE God Head cannot exist without the THREE divine Persons, and the THREE divine Persons cannot exist without the ONE God Head.
We who are “made in the image of God” also have a unique (eternal) person, in addition to our unique (temporary) personal lives.
This is the Spiritual Trinity of our Creator for me.
1. God in the world is our Creator’s Physical and Omnipresent aspect, as represented by Jesus.
2. God in the universe is our Creator’s Scientific, omniscient, and Mental nature, with God as a Presence, Power, and Source of everything in the universe.
3. God in the universe is our Creator’s Spiritual and Omnipotent nature, with God as our inner Source, The Holy Spirit within, without which we cannot be alive.
To come to this awareness, one goes through an intellectual and loving journey with our Creator and the universe. This leads to Cosmic Consciousness.
In some ways, this is akin to a theater production.
Each actor, singer, musician, scene designer, props manager must be able to be free to be all that they would be, rather than what some church body or government would have them not be. Each can feel free to to that through their becoming what they feel within.
How I long to come to understanding what it really means for thr Trinity to dwell within my whole being!
Guide me and teach me, O Beloved that I may make within me a truly welcoming home for the Trinity to dwell.
With an open trusting heart I place this deep longing right now.
For me, the Trinitarian God is a model of Love. Mature Love demands relationships and relationships that are able to bring forth creation through Awakening and Awareness. Not just of our individual consciousness, as in moving beyond the ego, but in seeing and loving with the heart rather than the mind.
The heart is the center of spiritual transformation and is in constant communication with the mind. Change the heart and THEN change the mind. Seeing the three unique beings of God( reread so many passages in Genesis where God is referred as us) in the model speaks to me not of transactions or economy but of love and loving.
Coming together to create, fusing, and then letting go so the newly formed creation may begin his or her own journey toward light. Is this not the way with all beings? All cells of all matter? To merely say a “transaction” is to discount the innumerable rememberings taking place.
For humankind to work our way out of this deathtrap, we must find our way to understanding vertical knowing of the Trinity. A knowing which includes the Cosmic Christ yet is so much deeper.
Muito obrigada Ilia! Este texto chegou-me no momento certo. Corresponde exatamente ao que se passa com todo o meu ser (consciente e inconsciente), Deus, Amor, Universo.
Será mesmo que o Amor prevalecerá neste mundo centrado no dinheiro e na economia?
Será que basta ir ao encontro dos outros, quando eles têm o desprezo de se rir na nossa cara?